Suggestion: Scale Down Eternity Port

Post ideas & suggestions you have pertaining to the game here.
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Alandra
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I'd like to see EP scaled down so that it feels more like a separate adventure. As it is, it feels wishy-washy, falling somewhere between an adventure and an extension. A lot of material is simply carried over from the vanilla game without much purpose or context. I'm a very story-driven player and I love the tight pacing of the vanilla game. EP's dead ends and loops frustrate me to the point of quitting.

Concrete suggestions:

I would remove (or at least scale down) the Ungoverned Territories (between St. Kat's and Jiang's Star). They feel extraneous to the EP storylines, and I haven't been able to figure out why they were included.

I would make stations from the vanilla plotline like those of Penitents and Domina more rare, and make the stations of the EP factions (APD, Diarchy, etc) more common.

Similarly, I would make EP-specific ammo more common. I often have to backtrack two or three systems just to find ammo for my Takao launcher.

I would also like to see more clear messages to the player about which parts of EP are still unfinished, though that is probably a separate topic. I've been having to dig deep into the forums and look at EP's high score lists to find out basic details about what is possible in-game and what isn't. (A list of hints similar to "20 things to do in Human Space" would be helpful.)

Thanks for reading. This is my first forum post. I feel like I have a fresh take on things because I''m relatively new to the game (I finished SoTP twice and EP once, and I'm just starting with CC). I'm very appreciative of this game and its community.
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AssumedPseudonym
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 Eternity Port definitely needs some more love to get it to feeling like a properly finished product. It’s been a while since I’ve really poked at it a lot, but I remember the non-CDM missions in particular as being incomplete (with some factions being worse off on that front than others).

 The suggestion to outright cut the Ungoverned Territories (save for St. Katherine’s Star and Jiang’s Star) from the expansion altogether is an interesting one, and frankly I think you might be onto something, there. They don’t add to the story, and only really add to the setting by giving a frame of reference and more systems to hunt through for loot and I’ll get back to that point momentarily. As of 1.8b4 (released yesterday), George has improved on how stations are spawned within systems, which will help constrain what shows up where — SotP encounters should be much less frequent overall in EP-specific topology.

 The one possible downside of removing the Ungoverned Territories? Money. You have three different currencies you need to worry about in the early game, and unless you focus really tightly on one versus another, you run the risk of not having enough to fund your upgrades. Or fuel and repair bills. That said, I haven’t actually tried a run through Eternity Port while focusing more or less exclusively on one faction versus another in a very long time, let alone while sticking to just the Near Stars topology, so it might be feasible by now after all. Never the less, it’s an intriguing idea. I’m in favor of at least considering and experimenting with it.

 (I’d also like to see George do another Eternity Port run, sticking to the Near Stars now that he’s constrained encounter spawns.)
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Alandra
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I appreciate your openness to this somewhat radical idea. It seems to me that the money/loot situation would be manageable, though I'm not experienced with those kinds of calculations.

I'm still running 1.7, because I'm a little wary of using less stable versions. (I'm running the game through Wine on Linux.)
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 Oh hey, a fellow Linux user. *Brofist.* ^.^

 I wouldn’t worry too much about using the beta releases, especially as late into the beta process as we currently are. It’s generally stable, the only real changes at this point are probably going to be fairly minor tweaks or bug fixes.
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I'm running the latest beta on Linux and there are no problems playing on my rather old laptop. One thing that might help is tweaking Wine a bit. I documented some of that elsewhere on the forum: http://forums.kronosaur.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8001

Still valid for the latest release of Wine.
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Alandra
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Thanks, Psueudonym and Ferdinand. I updated to 1.8b4 and followed your instructions to tweak my Wine setup. Things are working well so far.
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 Actually, I either completely missed the Wine setup thing the first time it was posted or just forgot about it when I was setting up the newer laptop. It definitely makes a difference.
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Alandra
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I'm in the midst of another EP playthrough, partially to test out whether removing the Ungoverned Territories would work in practice. It definitely would! I stuck to the western chain of systems all the way to Jiang's Star and I didn't miss the extra loot at all. I was a little short on Heliotrope fuel cylinders, which I'm partial to, but otherwise no ill effects were noticeable. The game flow was much improved, and I was able to complete most of the Eurasian and Luminous missions.
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